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enamast@cato.org (Andrew Mast)webmaster@cato.org (Cato Webmaster)Fri, 30 Jan 2015 09:27:29 -0500Wed, 25 Feb 2015 12:28:25 -0500Petrostates Have a Cheap Oil Maladyhttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/petrostates-have-cheap-oil-malady
Emma Ashford
<p>While consumers in the United States and Europe are cheering low prices at the pump, a variety of states that depend on oil revenue are expecting a period of uncertain income and budget shortfalls. Unfortunately, rather than encourage reform in these typically corrupt and authoritarian countries, the pressure of low oil prices is likely to result in increased instability.</p>
<p>Oil <a href="http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/crude-oil-brent.aspx?timeframe=6m" target="_blank">has halved in price</a> in the last six months, dropping to just under $50 per barrel. This plunge is driven by contracting global demand as well as efforts by Saudi Arabia to curtail growing oil production by the United States, Russia and other nonmembers of OPEC. The death of Saudi Arabia&#8217;s King Abdullah is unlikely to alter this situation, as newly crowned King Salman has been careful to emphasize continuity with his predecessor&#8217;s policies. As a result, oil prices should remain low for a while. Though oil was <a href="http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RBRTE&f=D" target="_blank">less than $20 per barrel</a> for much of the 1980s and 1990s, today&#8217;s prices mark a break from the more recent past, when prices had soared <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/07/11/us-markets-oil-idUST14048520080711" target="_blank">as high as $147 per barrel</a>.</p>
<p>In recent years, oil wealth has had a massive effect on petrostates. Oil revenue contributed to continued authoritarianism in some states and encouraged corruption and poor governance. Leaders had little reason to pursue economic development and diversification, resulting in weak economies reliant on oil income and leading many political scientists to describe oil as a curse.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">Countries with oil-focused economies face uncertainty and unrest.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given the often odious regimes at the helm of the world&#8217;s largest oil-producing countries &mdash; Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia &mdash; we may be inclined to welcome falling oil prices in hopes that price pressure may finally encourage reform. Unfortunately, these maladies cannot be easily fixed. An oil-focused economy cannot be turned overnight into a diversified economy that appeals to international investors. Rampant, institutionalized corruption cannot be stamped out quickly once it has taken root. And leaders who rely on oil wealth to prop up their authoritarian regimes are unlikely to seek democratic reforms.</p>
<p>Instead, falling oil prices are more likely to breed instability, though not all petrostates will be affected equally. Saudi leaders, for example, can fall back on <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30876920" target="_blank">massive cash stockpiles</a> to see them through the lean times. Instability among OPEC&#8217;s Gulf members is unlikely unless oil prices remain low for several years. But other OPEC members and non-OPEC states are less fortunate. </p>
<p>Venezuela is the most likely to see problems, with a state budget <a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/08/15/opec-budget-idINL6N0QL1VY20140815" target="_blank">based on oil prices</a> of $117 per barrel. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/13/moodys-venezuela-idUSL3N0US4LW20150113" target="_blank">Moody&#8217;s</a> recently cut Venezuela&#8217;s debt rating, giving it a negative outlook. The Venezuelan economy was already rocky, largely because of extremely poor economic management and overreliance on oil-funded social programs. But falling oil prices have made this crisis acute, so much so that President Nicol&aacute;s Maduro recently traveled to China and Saudi Arabia seeking aid. Venezuela may even default on its debt in 2015. The effects of the crisis will be felt increasingly by average Venezuelans and could trigger further violent protests such as those that rocked Caracas last year.</p>
<p>Iran and Russia face similar though less acute budgetary pressures, amplified by Western sanctions. Tehran recently <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-15/iran-s-budget-assumes-40-oil-after-prices-decline-33-.html" target="_blank">revised its budget</a> to account for the fall in oil prices, with the majority of cuts coming from infrastructure funds. As in Venezuela, the worsening economy will make popular unrest a possibility.</p>
<p>While sanctions have done some damage to the Russian economy, low oil prices are far more problematic for the Kremlin, which announced <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-facing-budget-cuts-on-oil-price-western-sanctions-1421223776" target="_blank">spending cuts</a> of 10 percent across the board for this year (with the exception of the military). Although the concomitant collapse of the ruble has, ironically, helped reduce the effect of falling oil prices, the government expects to see inflation of <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/14/russia-economy-inflation-idUSL6N0UT0BY20150114" target="_blank">15 to 17 percent</a> in 2015. This is not likely to lead to popular unrest, as Russians are accustomed to tightening their belts. Instead, dissatisfaction among elites could lead to tensions with President Vladimir Putin&#8217;s regime or to further domestic repression.</p>
<p>In Nigeria the government depends on crude oil exports for <a href="http://www.resourcegovernance.org/countries/africa/nigeria/overview" target="_blank">70 percent of its revenue</a>. Thanks to falling oil prices, inflation <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/09/nigeria-inflation-idUSL6N0SZ0Z120141109" target="_blank">has risen to 8 percent</a>, and Nigerian bonds continue to perform poorly. The state suffers from bureaucratic and military corruption even as it faces armed insurgency from Boko Haram. Elections on Feb. 14 may see President Goodluck Jonathan&#8217;s government out of power. Yet a new government would probably be unable to address these problems, and the low price of oil will only make it harder for Nigeria&#8217;s corrupt army to succeed in its battle against Boko Haram.</p>
<p>While it&#8217;s extremely difficult to accurately predict political instability, falling oil prices raise the potential for such instability in petrostates by worsening their existing economic and political problems. So rather than celebrate low prices at the pump, we should be wary: Petrostates are already in bad shape, but cheap oil may throw them into deeper disarray.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/petrostates-have-cheap-oil-maladyFri, 30 Jan 2015 09:23 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesEmma AshfordWashington and the Geopolitical Benefits of Plunging Oil Prices: Real but Limitedhttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/washington-geopolitical-benefits-plunging-oil-prices-real-limited
Ted Galen Carpenter
<p>The past six months have witnessed an extraordinary plunge in global oil prices. A barrel of Brent Crude now hovers below $50, a price roughly half of what it was in the late spring and early summer of 2014. That change has major economic implications for producers and consumers around the world. Consumers, as well as companies that must utilize large quantities of fossil fuels, understandably love lower prices. For example, the average American family of four currently enjoys approximately $35 per month in savings from reduced energy costs &mdash; money that can be used for other purposes.</p>
<p>The impact on oil suppliers is more complex. Low-cost producers, most notably Saudi Arabia, can still function profitably at the new price range, but higher-cost producers find their profit margins severely squeezed or even eliminated. US foreign policy officials are not displeased by that development. Although some domestic oil companies find themselves under pressure, the primary impact is on such foreign producers as Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Washington is on bad terms with the governments of those countries and is not unhappy to see their economies come under increased pressure, creating possible political problems for incumbent anti-US regimes.</p>
<p>Indeed, the United States appears to see potential geopolitical gains in all three cases. Those beleaguered oil-producing states also sense that US officials are pleased with the current pricing environment, and some leaders even suspect that Washington engineered the precipitous plunge in prices for geopolitical reasons. Venezuelan President Nicol&aacute;s Maduro explicitly charged that the Obama administration is attempting to destroy oil states that won&rsquo;t accept US domination of their foreign and social policies.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">Western leaders need to proceed in a sober, cautious fashion.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such a crude conspiracy theory is not supported by evidence. Two major factors led to the sharp decline in prices. One was a significant change in both global supply and demand trends. The past decade of high oil prices brought a surge of new sources on line, including the emergence of robust shale oil production in the United States. That development peaked in 2013 and early 2014, just as several rapidly expanding economies, especially those of China and India, experienced a marked slowing of their growth. Conditions were ripe for an oversupply of oil and a resulting price correction.</p>
<p>The other key factor was a Middle East struggle for political power between Saudi Arabia and its allies on one side and Iran and its allies on the other. Policymakers in Riyadh had a tempting reason to tolerate, or even encourage, lower oil prices that would weaken the power of Iran, a less efficient producer that was already experiencing economic problems as a result of Western sanctions over the issue of Tehran&rsquo;s nuclear program. It is no coincidence that as oil prices declined, Iran repeatedly urged members of OPEC to cut production in an effort to stem the decline, while Saudi Arabia refused to approve that strategy.</p>
<p>Although there is no hard evidence that Washington explicitly encouraged Riyadh&rsquo;s recalcitrance, Saudi policy benefits US diplomatic objectives with respect to Iran. Obama administration officials believe that, over the past year, Tehran has finally been negotiating in a serious fashion primarily because the Iranian economy is feeling the effects of international sanctions. Depressed oil prices add to the economic pain and, according to the assumptions of US leaders, may make Tehran even more cooperative.</p>
<p>There are other perceived geopolitical benefits to the United States from the Saudi-led campaign to drive down oil prices. Venezuela&rsquo;s already substantial economic woes have grown worse, making that country&rsquo;s populist government a less appealing model to other people in Latin America. Washington&rsquo;s fears about the possibility of a leftist &ldquo;Bolivarian&rdquo; revolution sweeping the region, which were prominent during the presidency of Maduro&rsquo;s predecessor, Hugo Ch&aacute;vez, are receding rapidly. Indeed, there are increased signs that Maduro&rsquo;s hold on power may be slipping.</p>
<p>And Washington is especially pleased about the pressure that lower oil prices are putting on Vladimir Putin&rsquo;s government. Although Western, especially European Union, sanctions imposed after Russia&rsquo;s annexation of Crimea account for some of Russia&rsquo;s economic distress, the oil price plunge appears to have been a far more important factor. Among other effects, the value of the Ruble has shrunk more than 50% in the past few months. As in the case of US policy toward Iran, US officials hope that the financial and economic discomfort will compel Putin to make major foreign policy concessions, if not capitulate on key issues, especially its relations with Ukraine.</p>
<p>Although developments may validate Washington&rsquo;s expectations with respect to Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, the Obama administration may be overestimating the potential benefits. Throughout history, governments have been willing to make economic sacrifices and watch their populations endure deprivation if the political and strategic stakes were high enough. Tehran&rsquo;s conduct over the past two decades indicates that gaining international acceptance of at least some Iranian rights with respect to nuclear technology is a high priority for the clerical regime. Increased economic pain as result of depressed oil prices is not likely to alter that calculation.</p>
<p>Moscow is equally unlikely to change course on central policy objectives. It is hard to imagine any Russian government agreeing to relinquish the newly acquired sovereignty over Crimea or to tolerate Ukraine joining NATO. Despite the ongoing financial and economic turmoil, those elements of Putin&rsquo;s policy remain popular with the Russian people.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that lower oil prices may provide some geopolitical benefits to the United States and its Western allies, but officials should not overestimate those effects and seek to achieve unrealistic gains. Indeed, pressing economically besieged countries such as Iran and Russia too far could backfire, creating unpredictable domestic instability and a surge of hostility toward foreign adversaries. Western leaders need to proceed in a sober, cautious fashion.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/washington-geopolitical-benefits-plunging-oil-prices-real-limitedMon, 19 Jan 2015 10:20 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesTed Galen CarpenterSteve H. Hanke discusses oil prices and global instability on BBC Radio's Newsdayhttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/steve-h-hanke-discusses-oil-prices-global-instability-bbc-radios
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/steve-h-hanke-discusses-oil-prices-global-instability-bbc-radiosTue, 06 Jan 2015 11:22 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesSteve H. HankeDoes Public Funding of Science Enhance Scientific Progress?http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/does-public-funding-science-enhance-scientific-progress-0
Terence Kealey, Patrick J. Michaels
<p>Many people believe that science and research are public goods and thus need financial support from the government. Most economists believe that economic growth depends on innovation which in turn arises from science and research. The conventional wisdom concludes that economic growth depends on government largesse, perhaps as much as it does on markets.</p>
<p>Economic growth and innovation are closely linked, but we might doubt that science and research are public goods. Consider the history of public support for science. The United States was effectively laissez faire in science and research until 1940, yet the inauguration of vast federal funding for science and innovation since that date has not altered the nation’s underlying rates of economic growth. The Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla transformed their industries without government grants. Indeed, in 2003 the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD found in surveying its members that only privately funded R&D led to economic growth—publicly funded R&D had no beneficial effects at all.</p>
<p>Everybody supports the public funding of scientific research: industry loves corporate welfare, the universities love the grants, the politicians love the reflected glory, and the general public believes the conventional wisdom previously noted. Terence Kealey argues that science and research are most certainly not public goods and that we could—if we wished—leave R&D solely to the market.</p>
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/does-public-funding-science-enhance-scientific-progress-0Fri, 05 Dec 2014 12:00 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesTerence Kealey, Patrick J. MichaelsThe Moral Case for Fossil Fuelshttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/moral-case-fossil-fuels
Alex Epstein
<p>Fossil fuels have driven human progress and dramatically reduced grinding poverty, says Alex Epstein. That&#8217;s a hard pill for many people to swallow.</p>
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/moral-case-fossil-fuelsFri, 21 Nov 2014 17:15 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesAlex EpsteinHow Land-Use Restrictions Block Growthhttp://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/how-land-use-restrictions-block-growth
Ryan Avent
<p>It would be nice if we had a better idea just what causes economies to grow. Adding more people or capital or resources into the mix will do it, of course, but to really make people richer one has to raise GDP per person, and that&#8217;s the bit economists are less clear on. Generally speaking, such rises come from improvements in “technology”, but technology is a catch-all for an entire set of productivity-boosting things we don&#8217;t understand, nor do we have a good sense of how best to increase the rate at which new technology arrives.</p>
<p>But if we aren&#8217;t exactly clear on how to get from point A to point B, we aren&#8217;t completely lost either. We can sift through modern economic history and observe where fast growth has tended to occur &mdash; or still better, where it is occurring now. In the absence of a clear and reliable recipe for creating growth ex nihilo, the most sensible approach to getting more may simply be to do more of what&#8217;s already working, even if we aren&#8217;t precisely clear on why it&#8217;s working. The best strategy, in other words, is reallocation.</p>
<p>Productive firms should get bigger, and absorb market share, capital, and workers from competitors that aren&#8217;t up to snuff. But for this reallocation process to work effectively, workers must be able to move from slow-growing places to fast ones. Perhaps the biggest constraint on growth over the last generation has been the inability of the rich world&#8217;s most productive cities to accommodate all the workers who would like to live in them.</p>
<p>Urbanization has always been a critical part of modern economic growth. Early industrialization occurred alongside a mass migration from the countryside and small villages to booming industrial cities. London was already one of the world&#8217;s largest cities in 1750, when its population reached about 750,000. Yet over the next two centuries the number of people living in London exploded, to over 8m. Cities around the industrial world &mdash; Manchester and Liverpool, New York and Chicago &mdash; experienced similar booms.</p>
<p>Big manufacturers needed to be as near as possible to suppliers and customers, because of the exorbitant cost to moving things over land. In practice, that meant locating near coal fields and port cities (into which raw materials could be shipped in and processed goods shipped out). Labor poured into cities in search of work, and the pool of available labor became an attractive force in itself. Urban growth was self-reinforcing. Concentrations of industry encouraged innovation in manufacturing, as firms tinkered with ways to improve productivity. Booming cities seemed to provide a double boost to growth: as people moved from less productive towns and farms to more productive manufacturing cities, and as economies of scale within the cities themselves raised productivity. The industrial revolution would have looked very different had urban growth been held in check, delivering less growth in output and incomes and less societal transformation.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s an important lesson for economies today. Technological change is again transforming economic activity. From the early 1980s advances in computing and information technology squeezed employment in middle-skill occupations, via automation as well as the expansion in global trade that new communications technologies allowed. In the many cities that had built their economies on mass employment of modestly skilled workers in industry or routine business services, this development was a killer blow.</p>
<p>But these technological advances were very good for different workers in different cities. Economists Edward Glaeser and Giacomo Ponzetto argue that the “death of distance” was very hard on industrial cities like Detroit, but a reinvigorating force in “idea-producing” cities like New York.<sup>1</sup> By expanding the markets in which good ideas can be deployed, information technology magnified the return to knowledge and to the skilled workers who contribute to it. A globalized financial market means that successful trading strategies generate enormous returns, and the concentrations of financial activity that generate those strategies have benefited correspondingly. Workers in technology clusters like the San Francisco Bay area have done very well as a result of their ability to provide their products to users around the world: from e-commerce to online gaming.</p>
<p>Successful cities have also shown the potential to drive employment growth. Economic historians Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey tracked the creation of new job categories in American cities over the past few decades.<sup>2</sup> They discovered that newly created work changed in nature between the 1970s and 1980s, from fairly routine tasks to brainier work that relied on more skilled or creative labor. They connect this shift with a geographical change: from the 1980s new employment categories overwhelmingly pop up in highly educated cities like Boston and San Francisco. It isn&#8217;t just the brainy that find work in such places, however. Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has calculated the “local employment multiplier” for various sorts of jobs. A new manufacturing job tends to correspond to the creation of 1 to 2 additional jobs in the local economy. For more skilled work this multiplier is higher, rising to 4 to 5 jobs for each new tech-industry position.<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>Past experience and theory suggest that cities whose economic purpose has been destroyed by technology ought to be losing people, the young and ambitious especially, to cities to which technology has provided new life. The population ought to be reallocating itself, in other words, toward places with high levels of productivity and high wages, the better to boost economic growth and lift household incomes.</p>
<p>But that is not at all what has happened. In 2000, there were slightly more people employed around the San Francisco Bay than in Dallas or Houston. Since that time, personal incomes in the Bay Area have grown about as much as those in the big Texas cities, even though Bay Area incomes were far higher at the beginning of the period. The real output of the Bay Area has also risen by about as much as that of Dallas and Houston.</p>
<p>The employment picture, however, could not be more different. Since 2000, employment in the Bay Area has grown by roughly 20,000 jobs. In Dallas, by contrast, employment has risen by more than 400,000 jobs and in Houston by more than 600,000. This remarkable divergence is part of a broader phenomenon in which Americans migrate away from the most productive cities. Between 2000 and 2009 the metropolitan areas of Boston, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington lost nearly 3m people, on net, to other American cities. The ten biggest recipients of net internal migration, on the other hand, absorbed over 3m Americans during that time, despite the fact that the average wage in the gaining cities was 25 percent below that in the losing cities.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>People are moving toward lower productivity places, and the reason for the phenomenon is clear: housing. The median value of a home in Harris County, Texas, the center of the Houston metro area, is just under $130,000. In Santa Clara County, in the middle of Silicon Valley, the figure is nearly $660,000. Wages in highly productive places are high, but often not high enough to offset the exorbitant cost of housing. And so people migrate, because the pay cut that results nonetheless entails a net rise in disposable income.<sup>5</sup></p>
<p>Housing is more costly in the most expensive cities because so little of it is built. In the 2000s, Houston&#8217;s housing stock grew by more than 25 percent while that in the Bay Area grew just over 5 percent. In 2013 Houston approved 51,000 new homes while San Jose okayed fewer than 8,000, despite the booming Silicon Valley economy. Glaeser and Kristina Tobio find that since the 1980s, the extraordinarily rapid growth in the population of Sunbelt cities is due primarily to the receptiveness of those cities to new construction.<sup>6</sup> A strengthening economy in places like Texas and Georgia leads to a construction boom and rapid population growth, while economic booms in coastal cities lead to very little population growth but soaring housing costs.</p>
<p>The net effect on the economy is difficult to estimate precisely but probably huge. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Moretti reckon that America&#8217;s inability to move people to the best opportunities means that over the last half century its GDP has fallen 13 percent below the level it might otherwise be: a tremendous loss in a $16 trillion dollar economy.<sup>7</sup> Were builders able to respond to demand, employment in the New York metropolitan area might be eight times higher than it currently is while employment in the Bay Area would be two to three times higher.</p>
<p>Those figures provide a big clue to what is constraining housing supply in productive places. Were the New York metro area to accommodate all the people who probably should be working there, its population would grow about as rapidly as it did in the 19th century. But that earlier population explosion occurred on a much smaller base and led to overcrowded slums, disease, and other urban ills. Avoiding those problems while growing at the necessary clip would force expanding places to spend massively on new infrastructure and to tolerate the almost complete reconstruction of their cities. The residents of places like Boston, New York, and the Bay Area don&#8217;t want the trouble, don&#8217;t want the crowding, and don&#8217;t want the expense. So they have organized methods to block new construction: through strict zoning codes, historical and environmental protection laws, and through overt political pressure.</p>
<p>If one had a magic wand to wave and wanted to boost growth, magically neutralizing opposition to new development in the most productive cities would be one&#8217;s best bet. In the absence of a magic wand, solving the problem probably requires a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it must be made easier for big cities to invest in big infrastructure projects, like the ones that allowed them to get so large in the first place. That means simplifying the regulations that constrain such investments and raise their costs. It means designing project bidding in ways that encourage competition and create the incentives for efficient, on-time construction. It means reforming the federal government rules that channel infrastructure money toward places that don&#8217;t need it, and, yes, it means using the federal government&#8217;s ability to borrow at remarkably low interest rates to make an economically justified investment in America&#8217;s future.</p>
<p>But infrastructure alone will not solve the problem. Instead, metropolitan areas may need institutional reforms that better balance the economic interests of the metropolitan area (and the country as a whole) with the interests and preferences of those living in neighborhoods that are likely to be affected by new development. When land-use decisions are made at a hyper-local level &mdash; giving local councilmembers or commissions extensive influence over which projects are approved, or focusing negotiation between residents and developers at the street level rather than the metropolitan level &mdash; the result will typically be far too little development. Those living immediately around a project enjoy some of its benefits but bear nearly all of its costs, in terms of disruption and congestion; they are therefore highly motivated to block projects and can succeed when local institutions enable them.</p>
<p>Political reforms could improve the situation. Roderick Hills and David Schleicher propose that metropolitan areas change the way they use city plans to make them “stickier”, so that they function more like development budgets that lay out how much new construction the city could use and where it should occur.<sup>8</sup> To keep to the overall budget, they reckon, more political bargaining over how to share the costs and benefits of growth would occur at the city level, rather than within individual neighborhoods. And because more of the benefits of new development are captured within the city as a whole, this negotiation framework ought to mean that more of the allowable construction in given city plan is realized than occurs under the typical planning arrangement.</p>
<p>Fixing planning regimes won&#8217;t be easy. But the return to getting it right is likely to be handsome: more people working in more productive cities, generating more economic growth.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong><br />
<sup>1</sup> <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w13710.pdf">http://www.nber.org/papers/w13710.pdf</a><br />
<sup>2</sup> <a href="http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/Technology%20Shocks%20and%20Urban%20Evolutions.pdf">http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/Technology%20Shocks%20and%20Urban%20Evolutions.pdf</a><br />
<sup>3</sup> <a href="http://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/multipliers.pdf">http://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/multipliers.pdf</a><br />
<sup>4</sup> BEA, BLS; Ryan Avent, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005KGATLO"><em>The Gated City</em></a> (2011).<br />
<sup>5</sup> <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621157-sky-high-house-prices-most-desirable-cities-are-holding-back-growth-and-jobs-home">http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621157-sky-high-house-prices-most-desirable-cities-are-holding-back-growth-and-jobs-home</a><br />
<sup>6</sup> <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_rise_of_the_sunbelt.pdf">http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_rise_of_the_sunbelt.pdf</a><sup>7</sup> See discussion of the paper at <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901041/nimbys-are-costing-the-us-economy-billions">http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901041/nimbys-are-costing-the-us-economy-billions</a><sup>8</sup> <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477125">http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477125</a></p>
<hr />
<p><em>The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Cato Institute. This essay was prepared as part of a special Cato online forum on <a href="http://www.cato.org/conference-forum/reviving-economic-growth">reviving economic growth</a>.</em></p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/how-land-use-restrictions-block-growthThu, 20 Nov 2014 17:29 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRyan AventPaul C. "Chip" Knappenberger discusses the Keystone XL Pipeline on FBN's The Willis Reporthttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-tv/paul-c-chip-knappenberger-discusses-keystone-xl-pipeline-fbns-willis
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-tv/paul-c-chip-knappenberger-discusses-keystone-xl-pipeline-fbns-willisSat, 15 Nov 2014 14:59 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPaul C. "Chip" KnappenbergerToward a Wealthier, Cleaner Planethttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/toward-wealthier-cleaner-planet
Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger
<p>The impact of climate change will be easier to handle in a wealthier world. So how much global GDP be devoted to the problem? Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger comments.</p>
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/toward-wealthier-cleaner-planetFri, 01 Aug 2014 17:35 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPaul C. "Chip" KnappenbergerYates v. United Stateshttp://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/yates-v-united-states
Bradley J. Bondi, Joseph J. Bial, Lex Urban, Christopher Jones, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus
<p>While commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, John Yates had his catch inspected by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission for whether it complied with size restrictions. Finding some undersized fish, officials cited him for a civil violation and he was ordered to bring the undersized fish back to the docks. Instead, he threw them overboard. While he probably knew he would face a fine, what he could not have foreseen was his subsequent criminal prosecution under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act three-years later. Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in the wake of the Enron financial scandal and cover-up. It includes a document shredding provision, Section 1519, that punishes those who knowingly destroy or conceal &ldquo;any record, document, or tangible object&rdquo; in order to impede an investigation. To Mr. Yates&rsquo;s surprise, he was convicted of violating Section 1519 and sentenced to 30 days in prison and three years of supervised release. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit upheld his conviction by narrowly focusing on the dictionary definition of &ldquo;tangible object.&rdquo; On appeal to the Supreme Court, Mr. Yates&rsquo;s asks the Court to overturn his conviction on the ground that he did not have fair notice that the destruction of fish would fall under Section 1519. We agree. In an amicus brief supporting Mr. Yates, Cato argues that well-established canons of statutory construction&mdash;that is, the rules that guide judges in interpreting statutes&mdash;do not allow Section 1519 to be reasonably interpreted to apply to fish. Those cannons teach us that a word in a statute, such as &ldquo;tangible,&rdquo; should be given more precise content based on its surrounding words, and that it should only be applied objects similar to the precise words preceding it. In short, the other words in the statute, such as &ldquo;record&rdquo; and &ldquo;document,&rdquo; modify the term &ldquo;tangible object&rdquo; to include things like hard drives and diskettes, not fish. Moreover, an all-encompassing reading of &ldquo;tangible object&rdquo; would render the words &ldquo;record&rdquo; and &ldquo;document&rdquo; unnecessary. Additionally, the broader context of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act illuminates the meaning of &ldquo;tangible object.&rdquo; The Act focuses on financial fraud in the context of companies, not destroying fish. Thus, the words &ldquo;tangible object&rdquo; should be read differently in Sarbanes-Oxley than they would be in, say, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If the term &ldquo;tangible object&rdquo; is read as broadly as the Eleventh Circuit&rsquo;s interpretation, it could potentially criminalize an unfathomable range of activities. As such, it would not provide adequate notice to those who may violate the law. Individuals have a right to fair notice of what conduct is proscribed by the law so they may plan their actions accordingly. Legislatures, not courts, should define criminal activity.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/yates-v-united-statesMon, 07 Jul 2014 08:44 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesBradley J. Bondi, Joseph J. Bial, Lex Urban, Christopher Jones, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor BurrusReducing the Risk of Oil Price Spikeshttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/reducing-risk-oil-price-spikes
Richard W. Rahn
<p>You may have noticed gasoline prices are rising. If the Middle East situation gets much worse, gasoline prices will rise even more. The good news is that we are likely to avoid long gas lines as we had in the late 1970s under President Carter, because fracking and other new technologies have lessened our dependence on foreign oil and gas. The bad news is that a major rise in oil prices could easily tilt Europe and other places back into a recession, which could kill the little growth the United States is now experiencing.</p>
<p>The tragedy is all of this was unnecessary, but brought about by the Obama administration, letting short-term political considerations and ideology override good economics and global security.</p>
<p>A few basics: As a result of the revolution in oil- and gas-production technology, the United States is just about self-sufficient in natural-gas production and is in a position to be a net exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) by 2016, provided the administration gives the necessary permits. The nation has more than sufficient oil and gas reserves to be the world&rsquo;s largest producer and even a net exporter of crude oil. Oil production has grown very rapidly but not nearly as rapidly as it could because the administration has put so many restrictions on oil production on federal lands and made the permitting process so slow. The United States is already a net exporter of petroleum products.</p>
<p>Oil and gas production in the United States is increasing more rapidly than the existing infrastructure can handle it, leading to transportation bottlenecks and, hence, higher prices. There is a shortage of pipeline capacity and new-generation rail cars. The administration has been very slow to provide the necessary permits for new pipeline construction of which the Keystone XL pipeline is the best known.</p>
<p>Why has the administration slowed or in some cases stopped the permitting processes? There is a combination of reasons. One is that it has an ideological prejudice against fossil fuels, even though so-called renewables make no economic sense in many cases and are not sufficient to provide more than a very small portion of our energy needs. Another reason is the Democrats prefer to cater to some of the big donors who are either environmental extremists or have a vested interest in the status quo. Warren Buffett controls major railroads and hence, benefits from shipping crude oil by railroad rather than by pipeline even though rail is more expensive, dangerous and environmentally damaging than pipelines. Regulators influenced by members of Congress can slow the permit process as a way of increasing campaign contributions.</p>
<p>It is in our national interest to export liquefied natural gas. It would bring income into the United States, create jobs and lead to a more economically and politically stable world. It would help the Europeans and others lessen their dependence on Russia for natural gas, and is likely to lead to less-aggressive behavior on the part of the Russians. Margo Thorning, chief economist of the American Council for Capital Formation, in a statement to Congress stated: &ldquo;American natural-gas production has already created 1.7 million new jobs, and experts estimate that LNG exports will stimulate as much as $73 billion in additional GDP annually.&rdquo;</p>
<p>For a company to export liquefied natural gas, it needs to obtain licenses from both the Department of Energy (DOE) and from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). As of April, 43 applications to construct new liquefaction facilities or construct new export facilities had been submitted to the Energy Department. Only seven companies have received conditional licensing from the department, and only one has been approved by both DOE and FERC. Many of these applications have been waiting many months, and some even years, for the regulators to make a decision.</p>
<p>The next time you fill your car up at the pump, please realize that you are paying a few extra cents per gallon because of bad decisions made in Washington. The price of oil is set by global supply and demand, and the United States cannot fully insulate itself from the effects of global oil-price spikes. However, what the nation can do is allow much greater production and efficient transportation (which is equally important) of oil and gas to reduce regional price variations. Increased production by the United States, coupled with an end of the restrictions on exports, would both stabilize global prices by adding a major new supplier, and allow America to directly benefit, rather than be just a victim, when oil prices spike for geopolitical reasons.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/reducing-risk-oil-price-spikesMon, 16 Jun 2014 09:21 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRichard W. RahnHow Fracking Has Saved Obamahttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-fracking-has-saved-obama
Richard W. Rahn
<p>Without fracking of oil and gas deposits, there would have been no economic growth in the U.S. over the past five years. Yet the oil and gas industry has been a favorite whipping boy of the environmental zealots both inside and outside of the administration. Without those brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers in the private sector who developed the new techniques to unlock massive amounts of oil and gas at reasonable cost, it is unlikely that President Obama would have been re-elected.</p>
<p>Many in the media and on the left seem to be endlessly surprised about the lack of economic growth during the Obama administration. Last week, the government reported that gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 1 percent in the first quarter of this year. Given the substantial tax increases, huge growth in wasteful government spending and overwhelming numbers of new government regulations, it is amazing there has been any economic growth at all. During the first five years of the Obama administration, economic growth averaged a dismal 1.2 percent, and only 2.2 percent in the four years since the recovery from the Great Recession began. According to the well-regarded economic-analysis firm IHS, the contribution to GDP from the development of unconventional oil and gas is now running at more than 2.5 percent of GDP per year and rapidly growing. This addition to GDP is expected to peak in 2016 at about 3.2 of GDP, and thereafter reach a permanently higher, steady state, which would not have occurred without unconventional oil and gas production.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">The president is loath to admit oil and gas have kept his economy afloat.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>&ldquo;Unconventional&rdquo; oil and gas production broadly refers to new technologies that have been developed to unlock oil and gas from geological formations that previously had been thought not to be economically recoverable. The most important of the new unconventional oil and gas production technologies has been the combination of horizontal drilling, which exposes more of the subsurface to the well, and hydraulic fracturing, which creates pathways that allow more oil and gas to flow through dense rock to the well bore. These technologies were developed, not by government, but by creative and risk-taking private businesses. As a result, the United States is already self-sufficient in natural gas and soon will be in oil &mdash; unless ever-expanding government regulation kills the golden goose.</p>
<p>Unconventional oil and gas producers, including suppliers of equipment and materials, and energy-related chemical production already support about 2.5 million new jobs, which is equal to about 1.8 percent of the work force. By 2025, an estimated additional 3.9 million jobs will have been created. On average, these new jobs pay more than jobs in other industries.</p>
<p>Disposable income per household has already improved by about $1,500 this year, as direct costs for natural gas have been reduced to heat homes and water, plus the indirect benefits of lower prices of many consumer items from manufacturers because of their reduced energy-input costs. This improvement in household disposable income will continue to grow and by 2025, it is estimated that household incomes will be more than $3,500 higher owing to unconventional oil and gas production.</p>
<p>The increase in unconventional oil and gas production has been a bonanza for federal, state and local tax collectors, resulting in about $100 billion more in tax revenue. For the period from 2012 to 2025, it is estimated that in total all levels of government will receive an extra $1.6 trillion dollars in tax revenue.</p>
<p>With all these benefits of unconventional oil and gas production, one would think that a rational government would be doing everything it could to encourage even greater production. That has not been the case, though. As in most other economic matters, many in the administration, from the president on down, are engaged in a policy of wishful thinking rather than cost-benefit analysis. The Environmental Protection Agency&rsquo;s war on coal is Exhibit A.</p>
<p>The administration&rsquo;s hostility to new energy production can be seen not only in its rhetoric, but, more importantly, in its actions. The federal government owns almost 30 percent of the land in the United States (most of which has been locked up by the regulators). As a result, much of the increase in oil and an astounding 98.5 percent of gas production since 2007 has come from non-federal lands.</p>
<p>If the president really wanted a rapidly growing economy and full employment, he could do it with one executive action. Such executive order should require all government agencies to drop all regulations &mdash; including energy, environmental, tax and financial &mdash; for which those agencies have not done a serious cost-benefit analysis, regardless of the magnitude of the regulation, and allow affected private parties to challenge (on cost-benefit grounds) any existing or proposed regulation in court (with cost reimbursement if they win).</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/how-fracking-has-saved-obamaMon, 02 Jun 2014 08:21 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRichard W. RahnBoom to Bust? How Export Restrictions Imperil America's Oil and Gas Bonanzahttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/boom-bust-how-export-restrictions-imperil-americas-oil-gas-bonanza
James Bacchus, Scott Lincicome, Mark Perry, Daniel J. Ikenson
<p>A once-in-a-generation supply shock is transforming global energy markets, lowering crude oil and natural gas prices, and quickly making the United States the world&#8217;s largest producer of oil and gas. But energy politics threatens to short-circuit this American economic boom. Of immediate concern are federal regulations &mdash; in particular, discretionary export-licensing systems for natural gas and crude oil &mdash; that were implemented during the 1970s, an era of energy scarcity. By restricting exports and subjecting approvals to the whims of politicians, the current licensing systems distort energy prices and deter investment and employment in these promising sectors of the U.S. economy. They also irritate global trading partners, likely violate U.S. trade treaty obligations, and undermine other U.S. policy objectives. Ernest Moniz, President Obama&#8217;s energy secretary, recently stated that these export restrictions are deserving of “some new analysis and examination in the context of&#8230; an energy world that is no longer like the 1970s.” Please join us at the Cato Institute for our examination of these issues.</p>http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/boom-bust-how-export-restrictions-imperil-americas-oil-gas-bonanzaMon, 10 Feb 2014 11:30 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesJames Bacchus, Scott Lincicome, Mark Perry, Daniel J. IkensonOffice of Management and Budget's Request for Comments on the Technical Support Document Entitled Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866http://www.cato.org/publications/public-comments/office-management-budgets-request-comments-technical-support-document
Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger
<p>The determination of the social cost of carbon (SCC) as made by the Interagency Working Group (IWG) and detailed in the May 2013 Technical Support Document (updated in November 2013) is discordant with the best scientific literature on the equilibrium climate sensitivity and the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide &mdash; two critically important parameters for establishing the net externality of carbon dioxide emissions, at odds with existing Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines for preparing regulatory analyses, and founded upon the output of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) which encapsulate such large uncertainties as to provide no reliable guidance as to the sign, much less the magnitude of the social cost of carbon.</p>
<p>The OMB should act not just to revise the current determination of the SCC, but to suspend its use in all federal rulemaking. It is better not to include any value for the SCC in cost/benefit analyses, than to include a value which is knowingly improper, inaccurate and misleading.</p>
<p>We highlight some of the major flaws in the current SCC determination in our following comments.</p>http://www.cato.org/publications/public-comments/office-management-budgets-request-comments-technical-support-documentMon, 27 Jan 2014 14:26 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPatrick J. Michaels, Paul C. "Chip" KnappenbergerHornbeck Offshore Services v. Jewellhttp://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/hornbeck-v-jewell
Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus
<p>By design, the federal judiciary is the weakest of the three branches of government. While the executive wields the sword, and Congress holds the purse strings, the courts have no temporal power. To give effect to their decisions and orders, courts depend on popular legitimacy and the cooperation of the other branches. While that cooperation is normally forthcoming when needed to enforce judicial decisions against private citizens, when the subject of a court&#8217;s order is the government itself, there&#8217;s always a risk that it will be ignored or avoided. Such is the present case, which began when the Interior Department (DOI) chose to put itself above the courts and above the law. Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010, DOI issued a total ban on drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. A district court judge held that this drilling moratorium was irrational and not supported by scientific research or other credible evidence. The judge issued an injunction prohibiting DOI from enforcing its ban. Instead of obeying the injunction &mdash; or appealing it &mdash; DOI ignored it. The Secretary of the Interior told Congress that as far as he was concerned, the drilling ban was still in effect. DOI then issued a second ban on drilling that was identical to the first. The district judge held DOI in contempt of court, noting that “each step the government took following the Court&#8217;s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcase[d] its defiance” of the court&#8217;s authority. On appeal, a panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided 2-1 with the DOI&#8217;s position that the contempt finding was improper because the issuance of a second (identical) drilling ban was not technically disallowed by the text of the injunction &mdash; which explicitly prohibited only enforcement of the initial ban. Cato has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case because the appellate court&#8217;s ruling undermines the rule of law and the judiciary&#8217;s independent authority. Under the Fifth Circuit&#8217;s rule, government agencies will be able to legally avoid court orders with bureaucratic trickery. If only the explicit text of an injunction &mdash; and not any of its spirit or clear purpose &mdash; binds the federal government, Congress or the executive could simply rename whatever statute or regulation has been declared unconstitutional and continue enforcing the substantively unconstitutional rule. Such an overly technical rule would force district court judges into the role of mind-readers, trying to predict how the government could weasel its way out of a ruling. Without an effective contempt power to punish the violation of its orders, even the Supreme Court would be unable to enforce its important rulings, such as ending the District of Columbia&#8217;s <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/district-columbia-v-heller">unconstitutional ban on handguns</a>, and striking down <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/united-states-v-windsor">section 3 of DOMA</a>. In both of those recent cases, the sort of semantic game-playing endorsed by the Fifth Circuit here would have resulted in hollow victories for liberty and an evisceration of the idea that in our constitutional republic, the government is bound by the same (if not stricter) rules as the rest of us.</p>http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/hornbeck-v-jewellMon, 12 Aug 2013 09:12 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesIlya Shapiro, Trevor BurrusThwarting America's Crude Awakeninghttp://www.cato.org/publications/publications/thwarting-americas-crude-awakening
Scott Lincicome
<p>The American &ldquo;shale boom&rdquo; is poised to revolutionize global energy markets. It could transform the nation from a longtime net oil importer into an export powerhouse. Consider that the 2012 increase in U.S. crude oil production, announced last week, was the largest not just in U.S. history but the world.</p>
<p>To help this transformation, a bipartisan swath of federal and state officials is pressing for new infrastructure, like the Keystone XL pipeline, to move a glut of domestic oil from the center of North America to Gulf ports. This is a crucial step, but unless Congress reforms archaic restrictions on crude oil exports, all that black gold&rsquo;s going nowhere.</p>
<p>These restrictions not only contradict global trade rules and national trade and energy policies, they also threaten to derail the American energy revolution. Yet, unlike similar restrictions on natural gas, almost no one in Washington is talking about them.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">Archaic restrictions on crude oil exports threaten to derail the American energy revolution.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a free market, the answer to the key question of where to sell all this new American oil would be simple: wherever demand takes it. Unfortunately, the U.S.crude oil market is anything but free.</p>
<p>Instead, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 authorized an export licensing system that, though intended to address temporary conditions, remains in place. It prohibits almost all crude oil exports &mdash; even in this time of abundant supply.</p>
<p>Exports today require a license from the Commerce Department that, except for shipments to Canada and a few other narrow circumstances, is only approved if the proposed transaction is &ldquo;consistent with the national interest.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Non-Canadian exports of U.S. crude oil are effectively banned. No license applications were approved under the &ldquo;national interest&rdquo; exception between 2000 and mid-2012, and <a href="http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_expc_a_EPC0_EEX_mbbl_m.htm" target="_blank">subsequent data</a> confirms that this unfortunate streak remains intact.</p>
<p>This <em>de facto</em> ban creates a host of problems. First, by curtailing exports and subjecting license approvals to the whims of bureaucrats, the current system slows domestic production, breeds economic distortions, discourages investment and destabilizes energy markets.</p>
<p>U.S. oil producers, for example, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-26/crude-export-ban-no-match-for-lightest-u-s-shale-oil-energy.html" target="_blank">lose</a> an estimated $10 billion a year due to their inability to sell crude in foreign markets. They&rsquo;ve also spent hundreds of millions of dollars building &ldquo;mini-refineries&rdquo; in the Midwest and Gulf region to circumvent the current restrictions and export a slightly processed, cheaper product &mdash; leaving another $1.7 billion in potential profit on the table.</p>
<p>As Rube-Goldbergian as this sounds, producers have few alternatives, given that U.S. oil consumption has <a href="http://www.peakfish.com/annual-us-oil-consumption-quadrillion-btu-1998-2013/" target="_blank">collapsed</a> in recent years and building new refinery capacity is virtually impossible in many &ldquo;environmentally friendly&rdquo; states. These problems prompted the head of the International Energy Agency to <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2217180a-70aa-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#axzz2W7PKtrh9" target="_blank">warn</a> recently that U.S. export restrictions put the &ldquo;American oil boom&rdquo; at risk.</p>
<p>Second, the export licensing system raises serious concerns under global trade rules. The World Trade Organization generally prohibits members from imposing export restrictions &mdash; including &ldquo;discretionary&rdquo; licensing systems or those that result in long delays. The U.S. system appears to do both. The executive branch alone decides on what is in the &ldquo;national interest.&rdquo; At least six pending license applications &mdash; first <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/94933124-1322-11e2-ac28-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Ik3jsCfz" target="_blank">reported</a> last fall &mdash; still haven&rsquo;t been granted. It also could be legally and politically difficult in this case for the U.S. government to assert WTO-sanctioned defenses for national security, conservation or temporary supply shortages.</p>
<p>Third, the oil export restrictions are at odds with some other Obama administration policies. Restricting oil exports, most obviously, undermines the president&rsquo;s National Export Initiative, the goal of which is to double U.S. exports between 2010 and 2014. . It also contradicts Obama&rsquo;s <a href="http://export.gov/static/2012%20National%20Export%20Strategy-06%2012_19_Latest_eg_main_056128.pdf" target="_blank">advocacy</a> of other energy exports &mdash; particularly renewables and nuclear power.</p>
<p>Using export restrictions to suppress input prices and help downstream industries contradicts the longstanding U.S. policy of classifying other countries&rsquo; use of similar measures as &ldquo;unfair&rdquo; subsidies subject to countervailing duties. The export ban also exposes U.S. exports of oil-based products to &ldquo;copycat&rdquo; duties in other markets.</p>
<p>Finally, Washington has long opposed restrictive and opaque export licensing systems at the WTO &mdash; speaking out, most recently, against Chinese restrictions on exports of raw materials and &ldquo;rare earth&rdquo; elements. The U.S. licensing system contradicts these positions and undermines multilateral efforts to combat such measures.</p>
<p>Given these problems, it&rsquo;s clear that the current crude oil export licensing system needs to go. Congressional supporters of the U.S. energy boom must lead the charge.</p>
<p>If advocates really want to develop our vast energy resources and expand the economy, they should craft a licensing policy that reflects the new energy landscape and the immense U.S. export potential.</p>
<p>They&rsquo;d also be restoring some overall coherence to U.S. trade and energy policy &mdash; and avoiding potentially embarrassing trade conflicts. If they ignore these restrictions, and their many flaws, the nascent U.S. oil boom could be snuffed out.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/publications/thwarting-americas-crude-awakeningThu, 27 Jun 2013 09:48 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesScott LincicomeThe Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Acthttp://www.cato.org/publications/testimony/federal-lands-recreation-enhancement-act
Randal O'Toole
<p>Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, for inviting me to testify today about the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act of 2004. As it happens, before I was informed of this hearing, I had written <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/improving-incentives-federal-land-managers-case-recreation-fees">a paper on this subject</a> that the Cato Institute is releasing today, and I ask that this paper be included as a part of my testimony.</p>
<p>The Recreation Enhancement Act effectively prohibited the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Reclamation from charging fees for dispersed recreation, as a result of which recreation is free on more than 98 percent of the lands managed by these agencies. While the law allows entrance fees on national parks and wildlife refuges, charging a single fee to cover all the many and varied recreation experiences on these lands makes no more sense than for a grocery or clothing store to try to earn its income from single entrance fee.</p>
<p>I will argue today that when Congress reauthorizes this law, it should allow and encourage all federal land agencies to charge fair market value for all forms of recreation. Furthermore, the agencies that collect the fees should be allowed to keep just half of those fees, while the other half should go to the U.S. Treasury as compensation for present and past appropriations for public land management.</p>
<p>In making these arguments, I am wearing three different hats. First is my hat as senior fellow for the Cato Institute, the nation&rsquo;s premiere free-market think tank. As a free-market advocate, I know that user fees will do more than merely help cover the costs of public land management. Although that is a nice bonus, the real role of user fees is to create incentives for both users and resource managers. Those incentives will insure, for example, that users will not overuse resources and that managers will create new opportunities for recreation.</p>
<p>A 1990 Forest Service report estimated that, at &ldquo;market-clearing prices,&rdquo; the value of national forest recreation was three times greater than the value of all other national forest resources combined. Even if these estimates were wildly inflated, recreation fees should be enough to completely cover the annual appropriations to most of these agencies. Such fees would obviously create significant incentives for land managers to cater to recreation users.</p>
<p>At the same time, there is no reason to expect that these fees would be a burden on recreation users. Americans today spend more than $650 billion a year on outdoor recreation, and market-rate fees would amount to no more than 3 percent of this total.</p>
<p>My second hat is as an environmentalist. Some may say, &ldquo;He can&rsquo;t be an environmentalist; he works for the &lsquo;evil&rsquo; Koch brothers!&rdquo; In fact, I have never met the Koch brothers and have no idea how they feel about recreation fees. But I have met the heads and funders of many of the nation&rsquo;s leading environmental groups, as during the 1980s I worked for the nation&rsquo;s leading environmental think tank dedicated to national forest issues.</p>
<p>In that capacity, I was hired by many of the nation&rsquo;s major environmental groups, including the Audubon Society, Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society, to write more than 100 different research papers and reports. My work was covered in <em>Newsweek</em> and <em>U.S. News & World Reports</em> and led one Forest Service official to tell a reporter, &ldquo;Randal O&rsquo;Toole has had more influence on the Forest Service than all of the environmental groups combined.&rdquo;</p>
<p>As an environmentalist, I want to protect habitat for endangered species and other fish and wildlife; healthy natural ecosystems; and clean rivers and streams. But my research in the 1980s found that the best way to protect these resources is through incentives, not mandates, and that the best incentives are created by user fees. Of all potential public land user fees, fees from dispersed recreationists provide the best proxy for these resources. Thus, allowing agencies to charge for dispersed recreation will effectively create incentives for managers to protect wildlife habitat, natural ecosystems, and water quality.</p>
<p>My third hat is as a recreationist. I live 500 feet from a national forest boundary; I cross-country ski, bicycle, and hike hundreds of miles a year on federal lands; and I have seen the effects of pinched budgets on recreation facilities. Dispersed recreation fees can help correct these problems and encourage federal land managers to create new opportunities for recreation.</p>
<p>Fees will do more than just improve recreation on federal lands, however. The federal government owns close to half the lands in the West, which means it sets the price for many resources. If it gives away dispersed recreation, other landowners will have little incentive to offer such recreation on their lands.</p>
<p>We know from experiences in the South, where federal lands are much less extensive, that when private landowners charge fees, the revenues they collect lead them to greatly alter their land-management practices in order to make their lands more attractive to recreationists. This includes going far beyond legal requirements to protect endangered species and other wildlife habitat and water quality. User fees for dispersed recreation on federal lands in the West would encourage other landowners to charge such fees, thus possibly doubling the opportunities for recreation.</p>
<p>One question raised by my recommendations is why should the agencies get to keep half of recreation fees, instead of all of the fees as they do under the Recreation Enhancement Act. My research has shown that allowing agencies to keep all fees on top of receiving appropriations for resource management gives those agencies incentives to overuse the resources. On the other hand, allowing them to keep no fees gives them no incentive to protect the resource. While 50 percent is somewhat arbitrary, it should be enough to create powerful incentives without promoting overuse.</p>
<p>Opponents of dispersed recreation fees make several arguments why they are special and should be allowed free access to public lands while all other public land users have to pay for what they use. I address these arguments in detail in my Cato paper. But my real argument for dispersed recreation fees is that everyone will benefit from such fees, including taxpayers, public lands, and recreationists themselves.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/testimony/federal-lands-recreation-enhancement-actTue, 18 Jun 2013 08:51 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRandal O'TooleImproving Incentives for Federal Land Managers: The Case for Recreation Feeshttp://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/improving-incentives-federal-land-managers-case-recreation-fees
Randal O'Toole
<p>In 2004, Congress allowed federal land managers to charge recreation fees only for certain kinds of recreation. In general, while national parks and wildlife refuges can charge entry fees, managers of other federal lands can only charge for developed recreation, such as campgrounds, not dispersed recreation, such as hiking and backpacking. As a result, recreation is free on 98 percent or more of the lands managed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Bureau of Reclamation. The 2004 law expires in 2014, giving Congress an opportunity to revisit this restriction.</p>
<p>Congress should allow federal land agencies to charge market rates for all forms of recreation. Fees can help pay for maintenance and improvements of recreation areas, and will create incentives for both recreation users and recreation providers. Without these incentives, agency managers have little reason to cater to the needs and preferences of dispersed recreationists.</p>
<p> Incentives will also help land managers resolve conflicts over land uses. Off-road vehicles, for example, are not compatible with wilderness hiking. Fees that determine actual market values will help land managers reduce these conflicts by setting aside an appropriate amount of land for each use.</p>
<p> Unlike users of developed recreation, dispersed recreationists prefer experiences of solitude and are willing to pay extra to enjoy such solitude. That means this type of recreation comes closest to being a proxy for ecological health. Supporters of long-term ecological health should support dispersed recreation fees in order to give land managers an incentive to protect ecosystems.</p>
<p>Particularly in the West, federal lands are such a dominant presence that they heavily influence the market price for recreation and other resources. By giving away dispersed recreation, the federal government reduces to nearly zero the value of such recreation to private landowners. Charging fees will encourage private landowners to collect fees as well, leading to increased recreation opportunities for everyone.</p>
<p>However, if the land agencies are allowed to keep 100 percent of the fees as well as appropriations for recreation, they will have an incentive to overproduce, and so will lose money on recreation. To avoid this, Congress should allow the agencies to keep just half the revenues they collect, while the other half should be returned to the Treasury to compensate for appropriations out of tax dollars spent on the federal lands.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/improving-incentives-federal-land-managers-case-recreation-feesTue, 18 Jun 2013 (All day)Latest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRandal O'TooleBiotechnology: Feeding the World, or a Brave New World of Agriculture?http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/biotechnology-feeding-world-or-brave-new-world-agriculture
Jon Entine, Kevin M. Folta, Karl Haro von Mogel, Patrick J. Michaels
Despite increasing population, global food production per capita is at all-time highs, even as the amount of agricultural land is reaching new lows. The prime driver has been technology, beginning with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when Norman Borlaug discovered the key to high-yielding wheat. Since then, “slow” genetics has been replaced by DNA-splicing, giving rise to fears of genetic “mistakes” damaging the world food supply or resulting in inadvertent harm to consumers. Jon Entine and Kevin Folta embrace these innovations, promoting genetic literacy and post-modern agriculture. At this forum they will answer the charge that biotechnology is “a Brave New World of agriculture.”http://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/biotechnology-feeding-world-or-brave-new-world-agricultureTue, 04 Jun 2013 14:00 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesJon Entine, Kevin M. Folta, Karl Haro von Mogel, Patrick J. MichaelsPaul C. Knappenberger discusses the Keystone XL Pipeline on XM Radio's P.O.T.U.S.http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/paul-c-knappenberger-discusses-keystone-xl-pipeline-xm-radios
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/paul-c-knappenberger-discusses-keystone-xl-pipeline-xm-radiosWed, 08 May 2013 13:14 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPaul C. "Chip" KnappenbergerThe Impact of Cartel Behavior on Global Oil Prices and the Challenge to Free Marketshttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-video/impact-cartel-behavior-global-oil-prices-challenge-free-markets
Jerry Taylor, Frederick W. Smith, Andrew P. Morriss, James L. Smith
<p>The OPEC cartel has been the key actor in world crude oil markets for four decades and counting. Even so, there is a surprising amount of disagreement about the nature of OPEC&#8217;s influence on oil markets.<br><br>In a new study published by Securing America&#8217;s Future Energy (SAFE), authors Andrew Morriss and Roger Meiners survey the academic literature and conclude that OPEC is an unstable cartel that has, at times, been effective in significantly increasing the price of oil. When the cartel has failed in this exercise, however, the price of oil has collapsed, possibly lower than would have been the case were the market not subject to cartelization. Morriss and Meiners believe that much of the volatility that characterizes world crude oil markets can be laid at the cartel&#8217;s doorstep and, as a consequence, “the international market for oil is not a free market.” Fred Smith will discuss the policy implications of Morriss and Meiners’ findings. James Smith, who has written extensively on the OPEC cartel, will comment.</p>http://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-video/impact-cartel-behavior-global-oil-prices-challenge-free-marketsFri, 03 May 2013 16:46 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesJerry Taylor, Frederick W. Smith, Andrew P. Morriss, James L. SmithProperty Rights and Lake Cd'Ahttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/property-rights-lake-cda
Randal O'Toole
<p>The basic principle of property rights is that people should be able to do what they want with their land so long as they don&#8217;t directly harm others. Unfortunately, this idea has been steadily eroded by the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>In 1927, the Court ruled that cities could regulate peoples’ land if there was a possibility that they might create a nuisance, such as noise or smoke. Cities did not have to wait until the nuisance actually occurred; just the possibility was enough to allow them to impose any regulation they wanted.</p>
<p>In 1976, the Court ruled that cities did not even need the excuse of a possible nuisance to regulate land. Instead, cities could take away most uses &mdash; and most of the value &mdash; of someone&#8217;s property for any reason at all, so long as they allowed some use, even if that use did not have much value.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">Instead of prescribing how people limit their pollution, property owners should be allowed to find their own solutions.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Decisions such as these have made land-use regulation the first thing many cities and counties turn to when confronted with property issues. That&#8217;s why some have proposed to protect Lake Coeur d&#8217;Alene by limiting new construction and development near the lake.</p>
<p>Pollution from septic tanks, golf courses, and other developments comes under the rule that peoples’ use of their property should not harm others. But land-use regulation is not the best solution.</p>
<p>For one thing, there is an important question of whether people who already own homes and other developments should be allowed to regulate people who may want to build such homes. Since many of the people already there vote, while people who may want to move there in the future don&#8217;t, the latter have little or no say in the question.</p>
<p>For this reason, an important principle is that any regulation should apply to everyone, not just new construction. If people are forbidden to build within 75 feet of the lake, for example, fairness dictates that any existing home within 75 feet be torn down. That obviously is not going to be popular.</p>
<p>Instead of regulating land uses, the county should simply limit the amount of pollution any property owner may allow into the lake so that the sum total of all pollution is a safe amount. Instead of prescribing how people limit their pollution, property owners should be allowed to find their own solutions. For best results, people should also be allowed to buy and sell their pollution rights.</p>
<p>For example, several low-cost techniques can reduce nitrogen effluent from septic tanks by two-thirds or more. Letting people chose the system they use will help promote innovation as someone who finds a way to dramatically reduce pollution can sell some of their pollution rights to others.</p>
<p>I realize this leaves open questions of how much pollution is safe and how to measure that pollution. But those are questions confronting any proposal. My argument is that a plan that works with property rights instead of against them is more likely to protect the lake.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/property-rights-lake-cdaSat, 20 Apr 2013 09:38 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesRandal O'TooleArkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United Stateshttp://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/arkansas-game-fish-commission-v-united-states-2
Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus
<p>The Supreme Court ruled in December that a taking occurs when a government action gives rise to “a direct and immediate interference with the enjoyment and use of land,” thus allowing the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission to proceed with claims relating to the damage caused by government-induced flooding of a state wildlife management area. (The lower court had bizarrely held that while temporary physical invasions and permanent floods were subject to takings analysis, temporary flooding, even if repeated, was not.) On remand to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, however, the United States, relying on a single passage from the opinion, contends that the Supreme Court created a new multi-factor test applicable to all regulatory and temporary physical takings claims. Cato has now joined the Pacific Legal Foundation, National Federation of Independent Business, and National Association of Home Builders on a brief supporting the Commission and arguing that the passage upon which the government relies is dicta and in any event cannot be read to upset the distinction between regulatory and physical takings that the Court has consistently asserted. It is well-established in the Supreme Court&#8217;s takings jurisprudence that government intrusions on private property that permanently deprive the owner of a valuable property interest are to be subjected to the same test, regardless of whether the invasions are permanent or temporary. Under that test, courts are to consider the duration of the government intrusion, along with other information, to determine (1) whether the invasion is the direct cause of injury to the property and (2) whether the injury is substantial enough to subtract from the owner&#8217;s full enjoyment of the property and limit his exploitation thereof. If the injury to the property is substantial, it doesn&#8217;t matter whether the it was caused by an invasion of limited duration; once it is shown that the government invasion directly and substantially interfered with an owner&#8217;s property right, the government has a categorical duty to pay compensation. In this case, the government&#8217;s intrusion permanently damaged significant property &mdash; valuable timber, from the destruction of trees &mdash; and is thus a compensable taking. The Supreme Court&#8217;s decision in <em>Arkansas Game & Fish Commission</em> didn&#8217;t modify or overturn the well-settled test for adjudicating physical takings claims, which remains distinct from the test that controls regulatory takings claims.</p>http://www.cato.org/publications/legal-briefs/arkansas-game-fish-commission-v-united-states-2Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:11 EDTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesIlya Shapiro, Trevor BurrusCoal Meets Marketshttp://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/coal-meets-markets
Peter Van Doren, Jerry Taylor
<p>While Mitt Romney&#8217;s 2012 presidential campaign fades in the rear-view mirror, the issues he ran on &mdash; particularly, his charge that President Obama is engaged in an economically disastrous “war on energy” &mdash; continue to inflame many conservatives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the consternation over the shutdowns of coal-fired power plants across America, shutdowns that many conservatives blame on the Obama administration. The Right should resist the temptation to score political points, however, and should instead cheer the closing of those plants.</p>
<p>Over the course of President Obama&#8217;s first term, 135 coal-fired power generators were shut down, and at least another 175 have announced that they will go dark by 2016. By 2020, about one-sixth of today&#8217;s coal-fired generating capacity will likely have disappeared. Why should conservatives applaud this news? There are two very good reasons.</p>
<p>The first reason is that these coal-fired power plants are being replaced by cheaper gas-fired plants. The gas-fired plants come courtesy of the revolution in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), which has delivered a vast supply of low-cost natural gas to an electricity market that has struggled with steadily rising coal prices since 2001. Smaller coal-fired plants are now more expensive to operate than gas-fired plants, and the price gap is narrowing for large plants as well.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote right">
<p class="pq-quote"><span class="open-quote">&ldquo;</span><span class="pq-body">Thanks to the revolution in hydraulic fracturing, the Clean Air Act&#8217;s economic favoritism is coming to an end, and low-cost natural-gas-fired power is reducing wholesale electricity prices.&rdquo;</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some have claimed that it&#8217;s not cheap gas that&#8217;s killing coal; it&#8217;s the regulations coming out of President Obama&#8217;s EPA, regulations that will cost coal-fired generators an estimated $126-144 billion in compliance expenditures. To be sure, the EPA regulations are expensive, but fuel costs are a much more important factor in the decline of coal. An analysis from the Brattle Group, a consultancy specializing in economics, concludes that future coal-plant closures will be “due mainly to lower expected gas prices.”</p>
<p>Peter Furniss, the CEO of Footprint Power, agrees. Speaking about the Salem (Mass.) Harbor Power Station, which Footprint bought in August 2012, he explained: “When we were first looking at the overall project, it really was a toss-up as to whether it would be more the environmental rules or the gas price that was going to drive coal plants to shut down. It now is very clearly the gas price.”</p>
<p>Should we at least decry the economic dislocations that follow from all this? No. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, in 2020, only 3,100 fewer people will be employed in coal mining than were employed in 2010, while the total output of coal mines will increase from $20.9 billion in 2010 to $27.7 billion in 2020. The job losses will be the result of increased productivity rather than declining coal production.</p>
<p>Complaints about the impact these coal-plant shutdowns will have on consumers are equally ill founded. The Brattle Group analysts concluded that shutdowns will not lead to any regional shortages of power, and while conceding that “it is plausible that there will be at least a transitory increase in wholesale energy prices,” they also said: “We generally expect that the effects on wholesale energy prices will not be very large or long-lasting.” One might expect the predicted loss of 49 to 57 gigawatts of coal-fired generating capacity by 2016 to put stress on the generation sector, but the market can replace that much capacity &mdash; and more &mdash; in relatively short order. For example, 97 gigawatts of new electrical generating capacity came online between 2007 and 2011, a period of relatively slack demand.</p>
<p>The second reason conservatives should cheer the demise of old coal-fired power plants is that the survival of those plants stems from government interference in markets. Their closure will end the state-sponsored transfer of wealth from everyone else in the electricity-generation business to the owners of these old plants.</p>
<p>Almost all of the coal plants being shuttered were in operation before the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970. That&#8217;s important, because the Clean Air Act imposed emission limits only on facilities built after its passage. Plants already in operation when the act was passed were to be regulated by the states. The EPA could require pre-1970 plants to adopt “best available control technologies” (as determined by the EPA) to limit air pollution &mdash; the same standards required of post-1970 power plants &mdash; but only if they underwent non-routine modifications that increased emissions.</p>
<p>Environmentalists didn&#8217;t mind this provision too much, because they thought the pre-1970 plants could not operate profitably for more than a decade or two. Their confidence was greatly misplaced, for two reasons. First, plant owners were able to modernize their grandfathered facilities without restriction until 1994, because the EPA did little to enforce the provisions requiring updated anti-pollution equipment. After 1994, the EPA decided to police modifications on a case-by-case basis. Those efforts have involved frequent trips to the federal courts to adjudicate difficult disputes about what constitutes a non-routine modification, which is legally equivalent to building a new plant. The industry&#8217;s legal and administrative resistance to enforcement added almost 20 years to the life of the old power plants, but court rulings against the industry&#8217;s position have now ended that tactic.</p>
<p>Second, the law&#8217;s exemptions provided a tremendous cost advantage for pre-1970 facilities relative to post-1970 facilities, and, until recently, industrial obsolescence has not increased costs enough to overcome this state-bequeathed advantage. Installation of a full complement of pollution-control devices, as required for new coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act, adds about 25 percent to a plant&#8217;s construction cost, and retrofitting those devices onto existing plants would certainly cost even more. New EPA regulations and legal consent decrees have increased the costs of existing plants, but those increases are a minor consideration compared with the doubling of coal prices and the halving of natural-gas prices, which has finally offset the advantage provided by the unfettered right to pollute.</p>
<p>This is a good thing. The proper measure of whether the government is too large is not how much it taxes, spends, or regulates; it&#8217;s how much wealth is redistributed as a result. By grandfathering old coal-fired power plants, the government bestowed an artificial economic advantage on them, and, as a consequence, revenue that would otherwise have gone to owners of post-1970 coal-fired plants, gas-fired plants, nuclear power plants, and renewable-energy plants went instead to the owners of pre-1970 coal-fired plants. That this wealth transfer occurred indirectly, via regulatory policy, rather than directly, via fiscal policy, is not particularly important. We would surely object to a proposal to levy a special tax on every post-1970 power plant, with the proceeds going to owners of pre-1970 coal-fired plants; yet the exemption for pre-1970 plants brings about exactly the same result.</p>
<p>Some conservatives argue that the Clean Air Act&#8217;s pollution-control regulations are indefensible, and that while it&#8217;s unfortunate that new plants are forced to comply with them, at least the old plants do not also have to do so. But can we really believe that their emissions impose no significant health harms on anyone? Most of the coal-fired plants that have been or will be retired during the Obama administration lack any pollution-control devices. One can question current emissions standards and regulatory approaches without denying that some regulation to control pollutants is necessary.</p>
<p>Environmentalists’ blanket hostility to fossil fuels has encouraged many who are hostile to environmentalists to defend the use of all such fuels. But that sentiment should not lead us to blindly defend the existence of all coal-fired generation anywhere, under any circumstances. Thanks to the revolution in hydraulic fracturing, the Clean Air Act&#8217;s economic favoritism is coming to an end, and low-cost natural-gas-fired power is reducing wholesale electricity prices. Those who believe in free markets should be pleased.</p>
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/coal-meets-marketsMon, 25 Feb 2013 16:05 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPeter Van Doren, Jerry TaylorJerry Taylor discusses oil speculation on WGN's The Mike McConnell Showhttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/jerry-taylor-discusses-oil-speculation-wgns-mike-mcconnell-show
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/media-highlights-radio/jerry-taylor-discusses-oil-speculation-wgns-mike-mcconnell-showWed, 20 Feb 2013 15:43 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesJerry TaylorFrackNationhttp://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-video/fracknation
Phelim McAleer
<p>Hydraulic fracking is controversial, but should it be? Phelim McAleer, director of the film, <em>FrackNation</em>, argues that fracking&#8217;s critics have vastly overstated their case.<br><br>Video produced by <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/caleb-brown">Caleb O. Brown</a> and Austin Bragg.</p>http://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-video/fracknationMon, 04 Feb 2013 13:19 ESTLatest Cato Research on Natural ResourcesPhelim McAleer